[BRIEF NOTE] The Pleiades
Apr. 13th, 2008 07:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldBack in the fall of 2006, I was walking down Queen Street West with Jerry when we came across Studio Brilliantine ((1082 1/2 Queen Street West). It's a neat little "21st century knick knack shop" generally, with plenty of Barbapapa paraphrenalia and the writings and photographs of Swiss UFO contactee Billy Meier, the brave man (two dozen assassination attempts!) who has told the entire world about the kind brilliant humanoids visting Earth from, among other places, Pleiades star cluster perhaps 440 light years away from Sol.
I saw Orion during Earth Hour, but I missed out on other favourites. I would have loved to see the W-shaped chair of Cassiopeia, complete with the barely visible and binary of Eta Cassiopeiae, with its hopefully Sol-like yellow sub-dwarf and its red dwarf companion, right below the chair's hub. The Big Dipper is another favourite, the dipper's right limb (as I learned in Scouts) pointing towards the North Pole and distant pulsating Polaris. I was particularly disappointed to not see the Pleiades.
It isn't as if I could find them easily in normal circumstances. My eye-sight isn't what I'd like it to be and sometimes, starmaps can confuse me. Even when I have seen them, I've never seen more than a faint glowing patch with a half-dozen pinpricks of light. (Believe me when I say that Calaeno is quite outside of my sight.)
Something about the Pleiades has interested me. It might be the fact that it's a dense self-contained body, a bright star-producing entity in its own right, as close to a sighting of Andromeda or the Magellanic Clouds as I'm likely to get with my glasses-aided eyes. Where is it going, where has it come from, why are we here to see it? This sort of fascination mght have inspired the 2300AD gaming supplement Bayern, which reveals that the cluster is a construction shanty. Perhaps more seriously, a Googling suggests that most of the interest in the cluster comes from its associations with ufology--see Zeta Reticuli for a comparison. I very much doubt that I'll be able to find Reticulum, alas. The Pleiades, despite my eyesight, are achievable. Maybe that's why I'd like to see them again, and soon.
I saw Orion during Earth Hour, but I missed out on other favourites. I would have loved to see the W-shaped chair of Cassiopeia, complete with the barely visible and binary of Eta Cassiopeiae, with its hopefully Sol-like yellow sub-dwarf and its red dwarf companion, right below the chair's hub. The Big Dipper is another favourite, the dipper's right limb (as I learned in Scouts) pointing towards the North Pole and distant pulsating Polaris. I was particularly disappointed to not see the Pleiades.
It isn't as if I could find them easily in normal circumstances. My eye-sight isn't what I'd like it to be and sometimes, starmaps can confuse me. Even when I have seen them, I've never seen more than a faint glowing patch with a half-dozen pinpricks of light. (Believe me when I say that Calaeno is quite outside of my sight.)
Something about the Pleiades has interested me. It might be the fact that it's a dense self-contained body, a bright star-producing entity in its own right, as close to a sighting of Andromeda or the Magellanic Clouds as I'm likely to get with my glasses-aided eyes. Where is it going, where has it come from, why are we here to see it? This sort of fascination mght have inspired the 2300AD gaming supplement Bayern, which reveals that the cluster is a construction shanty. Perhaps more seriously, a Googling suggests that most of the interest in the cluster comes from its associations with ufology--see Zeta Reticuli for a comparison. I very much doubt that I'll be able to find Reticulum, alas. The Pleiades, despite my eyesight, are achievable. Maybe that's why I'd like to see them again, and soon.
